FedEx Delivers Billions to the Taxman - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/fedex-delivers-billions-to-the-taxman-11574294109?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution makes clear "the right of the people . . . to petition the government for a redress of grievances," and the FedEx board of directors and senior management takes this very seriously. As a corporate citizen, we decided many years ago to engage openly in four areas of public policy that have strategic implications for our company and the more than half a million people who work for us: energy, the environment, trade and taxes.

Although FedEx is an American company focused mostly on governmental issues in the U.S., we serve 220 countries and territories around the world, and appropriately make our views known on these topics internationally as well. We would never advocate policies that we did not feel benefit society overall.

During the Obama administration, and more recently the Trump administration, we worked consistently to change U.S. corporate tax policies. As one country after another lowered corporate tax rates, the U.S. stood by and allowed wide swaths of this country to be deindustrialized due in large measure to its globally uncompetitive business tax rates. At the same time, the country lost focus on vital trade policies following the financial crisis of 2008-09.

The primary victims of this governmental disregard were blue-collar, high- school-educated wage earners, particularly outside metropolitan areas. President Obama belatedly came to embrace the need for a change in both policy areas and supported lower corporate tax rates, increased infrastructure spending, and new trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. I met with Mr. Obama several times on these issues, and I hope our views were in part responsible for his positions during his second term.

When President Trump took over along with a Republican Congress, we worked very hard through various open communication channels, coalitions, and meetings with members of Congress and the administration to effect passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

While I met with Mr. Trump on a couple of occasions, I never discussed tax reform with him, although we did talk about other public-policy matters. We at FedEx were very pleased when he signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law on Dec. 22, 2017. In response, we increased capital expenditures. We placed a major order for 24 Boeing wide-body freighters, funded major facilities modernizations and expansions, put additional funds in our pension plan, and increased wages by more than $200 million.

Had the tax cuts not passed, we would have significantly lowered capital expenditures in 2018. Instead, the expensing provision of the legislation encouraged FedEx to buy new 777F and 767F aircraft. During the debate on tax reform, the chief executive of UPS, David Abney, and I jointly penned an op-ed in these pages urging passage of corporate tax reform.

I know the FedEx aircraft orders created thousands of incremental new jobs for Boeing, General Electric (the engine supplier on freighters), and a multitude of smaller suppliers. In fact, each order of a 777F injects about $540 million into the U.S. economy, supports 1,850 jobs, and generates roughly $45 million in federal, state and local taxes.

While major capital expenditures under the tax-cut legislation can be expensed, thereby initially deferring U.S. corporate tax receipts, these assets should produce significant revenues for the U.S. Treasury in the years to come while also providing great jobs for the thousands of people who will operate, maintain and provision FedEx and UPS aircraft.

There is little doubt the significant increase in U.S. employment and wages since the tax cuts were passed is due to the decrease of corporate tax rates from 35% (which we used to pay) to 21%, which is competitive with the rest of the industrialized world. Over the past five years, we have paid more than $10 billion in U.S. taxes. After the temporary effect of capital expensing wears off, I expect FedEx will pay billions more into the U.S. Treasury from the earnings produced by our investments.

The recent slowdown in U.S. companies' capital expenditures is, in my opinion, due to trade disputes and the attendant global slowdown. We believe re- embracing TPP and TTIP and passing the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement would reverse these trends in short order.

With the above background in mind, I urge readers to review the New York Times's disparaging story from Nov. 17 about FedEx's involvement in corporate tax reform and see a great example of polemics: printing selected facts, connecting unrelated events, and implying nefarious activities when there were none whatever. FedEx takes great pride in being a good corporate citizen—here and abroad—at all times.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was a great achievement for the American people, and we are proud to have played a small role in passing this important legislation.

Mr. Smith is chairman and CEO of FedEx Corp.

<comment><USER3> > Mr. Smith is chairman and CEO of FedEx Corp.

You should have that at the start or somehow make it obvious what you have done in quoting the article.

<comment><USER2> >You should have that at the start or somehow make it obvious what you have done in quoting the article.

I figured most people would be able to figure it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was really thinking before I clicked that the title was making fun of FedEx. Such a disappointment.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can't read because of the paywall, but their previous response amounted to "No, you."

>The Times article is "distorted and factually incorrect," Smith said in a statement in response to the article. The CEO lobbied for the tax cuts in 2017.

>"Pertinent to this outrageous distortion of the truth is the fact that unlike FedEx, the New York Times paid zero federal income tax in 2017 on earnings of $111 million, and only $30 million in 2018 — 18% of their pretax book income," he said.

>Smith didn't dispute any specific details of the article in his statement, but challenged Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger to a public tax debate.

Edit: Source for the above is [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nyt-fexex-case- study-shortcom...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nyt-fexex-case-study- shortcomings-154005651.html)

<comment><USER6> "Smith didn't dispute any specific details of the article in his statement"

This is factually incorrect.

Here are some direct rebuttals:

NY times allegation: "In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. "

FedEx rebuttal: "FedEx has paid federal income tax every year, including fiscal year 2018."

NY Times allegation:" FedEx reaped big savings, bringing its effective tax rate from 34 percent in fiscal year 2017 to less than zero in fiscal year 2018, meaning that, overall, the government technically owed it money. But it did not increase investment in new equipment and other assets in the fiscal year that followed, as Mr. Smith said businesses like his would."

FedEx rebuttal: "Following passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), FedEx invested billions in capital items eligible for accelerated depreciation and made large contributions to our employee pension plans"

Etc, etc, etc... These are literally the first few sentences from BOTH the article and the response. Either you're being intellectually dishonest by claiming that they didn't dispute and specific details or you're incompetent.

<comment><USER4> > FedEx rebuttal: "Following passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), > FedEx invested billions in capital items eligible for accelerated > depreciation and made large contributions to our employee pension plans"

That's not a rebuttal, because they were investing that before the tax cuts too. They actually invested less in 2018 than they had been projecting before the tax cut!

>NY times allegation: "In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. "

>FedEx rebuttal: "FedEx has paid federal income tax every year, including fiscal year 2018."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21565736](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21565736)

> Page 60 of their 2019 annual report will show you (link below). The TCJA > (Tax Cut/Job Act) removed $1.354 billion from what they were expected to > pay. They had several other benefits against their overall tax rate, but > that was by far the highest in 2018. It lead to them owing -5% in taxes or > $219 million. > [http://s1.q4cdn.com/714383399/files/doc_financials/annual/20...](http://s1.q4cdn.com/714383399/files/doc_financials/annual/2019/FedEx- > Corporation-2019-Annual- > Report.pdf?utm_source=InvestorRelations&utm_medium=Referral&utm_campaign=AnnualReport2018&utm_content=FinancialInformationAnnualReports)

How do these claims add up, exactly?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to host lots of little web apps? - <AUTHOR> I have a bunch of web apps that I'd like to host without too much headache? Digitalocean is nice but I have to manually monitor each one. None of them require databases or any complex configuration. <comment><USER2> I've used these guys in the past [https://zeit.co/pricing](https://zeit.co/pricing)

They have a decent free plan and their Pro plan is pretty good value.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have the Docker images, try hyper.sh. The easiest and fastest way to deploy apps with Docker.</comment>


Understanding CSS Timing Functions - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/04/15/understanding-css-timing-functions-2/?utm_source=html5weekly&utm_medium=email <comment><USER2> Thanks for submitting this. Excellent depth and impressive demos.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any SaaS services that access your database directly? - <AUTHOR>

For example, you have a Postgres database and for some reason you also need data from some third-party app elsewhere, say, GitHub.
For practical reasons you need the GitHub data inside your database, so you need to build system that fetches the data periodically, or a system that handles GitHub webhooks, and update your database accordingly.
Now we can imagine that could be a service that handled this "sync" part for you, fetching data from GitHub and updating it directly in your database.
The question is: is it a normal practice to do this? Does it exist somewhere? What are the problems of this approach? <comment><USER2> I came across this this morning: [http://www.tray.io](http://www.tray.io) via an article on TC: [http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/tray-io-raises-2-2m-for- an-...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/tray-io-raises-2-2m-for-an-ifttt- style-integration-marketplace-to-connect-enterprise-apps/)

I'm guessing there are some annoying problems around 3rd party quality / stability / undocumented or unofficial APIs.

</comment><comment><USER3> KISSMetrics does the reverse, they bring your DB data into their service directly. But it's essentially the same setup.

[http://support.kissmetrics.com/integrations/mysql/index.html](http://support.kissmetrics.com/integrations/mysql/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Looker is a good example [http://www.looker.com/product/data](http://www.looker.com/product/data)

</comment><comment><USER5> Make sure to grant only select privileges on the database. Don't grant any privileges on sensitive information tables.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looking at doing the same thing with GA and a few other sources.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you want to provide a service that fetches data from GA API and saves it at others' databases? Or are you looking for this service?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is what enterprise application integration is all about.</comment>


Show HN: SquadVue – Create headshots online and easily show off your squad - <AUTHOR> http://squadvue.com/ <comment><USER2> [http://squadvue.com/tour](http://squadvue.com/tour)

so. many. young. white. people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback. This is an important, often overlooked, topic.</comment></comment>


The secretive life of a Michelin inspector - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/09/top-chefs-michelin-stars <comment><USER2> > There are 30 three-star restaurants in Japan, as of this writing, compared > with 26 in France and 12 in the U.S. Michelin began rating restaurants in > Japan around the same time the guide came to America.

As a French guy who lived in Japan for some time, I've got a very simple explanation for why Japan has more Michelin stars than France.

If you go to a normal average restaurant in France, the food will usually not be very good, they will serve dishes prepared with pre-made sauces from Metro, they won't serve anything amazing. There's a very big discrepancy in France between normal restaurants priced less than 20 euros per person for lunch without wine and the gourmet more expensive restaurants.

People also go out to restaurants a lot less than in Japan so there are less restaurants in France. In Japan, Osaka has 16,000 restaurants. Tokyo has 55,000 restaurants. Paris only has 14,000.

Even restaurants that are not very expensive (1000 yens lunches) in Japan tend to only use homemade ingredients. They don't use pre-made sauces. The average quality of normal restaurants is much higher and a lot of the Chefs at those restaurants are actually passionate about the food and try hard to improve their skills.

So, it's simple, Japan is a country with at least twice the number of restaurants per population as France and with a much higher percentage of passionate chefs that want to improve their skills and are there for the love of food rather than for earning money. It's actually surprising that Japan still has so little Michelin stars.

As for michelin stars, I actually trust the Gault et Millau guide a lot more in France, they don't care as much about the atmosphere and the service, they care about the food and ultimately that's the only that matters for me.

<comment><USER3> Anecdotally, the Michelin restaurants in Japan optimize for much much more than just food. The most expensive meal I've ever had was at Kikunoi in Kyoto (3 Michelin stars). I was excited about this meal for MONTHS. And although I do love traditional Japanese food, the meal was - to be honest - worse than most Bib Gourmand meals I've had here in SF. Atmosphere and presentation - divine - but the food wasn't nearly as tasty as the 1000 yen bentos.

<comment><USER4> Kikunoi is excellent, but it can be challenging for westerners to appreciate, especially some seafood dishes. I've adjusted a lot, but I still don't eat shirako[1] for example, which they often serve (male fish sperm).

Once you're accustomed to the food in Japan, the ingredients taste ... low grade even at most of the "nicer" restaurants in San Francisco (especially the meats or fish). Japanese say this secretly to each other, only Japanese can taste it, but actually anyone who lives in Tokyo long enough can taste it. song is very correct.

The quickest way to appreciate the food in Japan, try the $10 pasta at any place highly rated on Tabelog, and you will see that the quality difference is just as song describes. The difference extends far beyond the chefs, it's the farms, fisheries, logistics and overall high standards all working together.

[1] [http://www.thekitchn.com/the-strangest-food-i-ever- ate-2-919...](http://www.thekitchn.com/the-strangest-food-i-ever-ate-2-91992)

<comment><USER5> Shirako is one of my favorite dishes, though the first time I ate it nobody told me what it was until we were in the cab ride home from the restaurant.

I was wondering why my ex-wife's mom kept giggling during dinner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's very little in this article about the life of an inspector. It's all about the restaurants.

(this is an 'editorialized' title)

<comment><USER7> Agreed. There is not very much at all about the inspectors. It was a good read all the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> Somewhere in the last 5 or more years, web articles started using summaries for titles. I wouldn't say editorialised, I'd say it's more a case of "Article has ridiculously long title" and try to shorten it before I post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > she explained that for the job the inspectors, on average, eat two > restaurant meals a day almost every day of the week except weekends, at > least 200 meals a year. They are on the road constantly. "It's not that > we're trying to be secretive for its own sake," she said, "but … we want to > maintain the quality and integrity of the process."

Being an inspector isn't the easy job I thought it would be :)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting that high star restaurants are expected to not serve more common ingredients. I went to Manresa in Los Gatos once. Very good but I felt that I was being filled with bread (which was divine) between courses but would have preferred to see what they could do with chicken as a cheap filler instead. Now I have some idea why they would not use it as a filler dish.

I also find that if a place like Oaxaca has no Michelin stared restaurants, the Michelin guide is limited to a kind of food and not necessarily the best food the world has to offer. Though I am probably overly partial to mole in it's various forms...

<comment><USER10> In order to win a star, Michelin has to produce a guide for the area. There are only three cities in the United States that have a guide (I believe: San Francisco, Chicago, and New York). So you won't find a michelin starred restaurant in New Orleans for instance, which sort of undermines the prestige of the whole thing.

There are many many great restaurants in the world that are not Michelin eligible, which is a real shame.

<comment><USER11> Las Vegas had one as well but it's been discontinued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am suddenly very curious about how quality control in tyre manufacturing works.

</comment><comment><USER13> Criticism is the lowest form of art.

<comment><USER14> Then we should be happy that some people are willing to humble themselves to this "low" art form.</comment></comment>


Toyota: 81514 issues in the code, 89 people killed - <AUTHOR> http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0439/ <comment><USER2> > Hey, Toyota, we found a couple of bugs in your code, namely 7134 MISRA > standards violations, recursion, 740-string long function and 9000 global > variables

Why is recursion a bug? Recursion is not just a bug just because it's not as efficient for some problems. Most of the time the compiler will optimize out the recursion.

>740-string long function

What does that even mean? Are they talking about the length of the function in lines? If so that's not horrible depending on what you're doing. No it's not ideal but if it works and it's correct it's not inherently a bug. It entirely depends on what's going on in the function.

Edit: Reading more there are even crazier complaints. Nested "/* */" comments are considered a bug. What the hell?

Also using a Macro-like function is a bug? That makes no sense. If you've got something that really doesn't need to be a function it's fine to put it into a macro. For instance

       #define GET_LSD(number) (number % 10)

This just gets the least significant digit. Should this be a function? I don't think so. Using a macro lets you see why you're modding by 10.

Continuing onward... the use of "continue" is a bug. That doesn't make any sense.

Then we get onto the rule of 10 rules.

> Do not use dynamic memory allocation after initialization. > Give all loops > a fixed upper-bound. > Limit functions to no more than 60 lines of text > > Use minimally two assertions per function on average

How the hell do you avoid allocating memory? How the hell do you poll sensors and send a value onto a CAN bus without a while (true) loop? Is a function with 70 lines not allowed? Use two assertions per function, what?</comment>


Why I Left "Off The Hook" - <AUTHOR> http://gandre.ws/blog/blog/2012/11/13/wbai-has-got-to-go/

<comment><USER2> Makes me sad to read this-- my mother was a devoted 'BAI listener waaaaaaay back in the 60s and 70s so it was a part of my childhood. I knew there have been various scandals and woes over the years. Sigh...</comment>


What "Worse is Better vs. The Right Thing" is really about (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://yosefk.com/blog/what-worse-is-better-vs-the-right-thing-is-really-about.html <comment><USER2> Even more generally, I think there's something to be said about the difference between two different mentalities, presented here in caricature form:

1\. The world is tainted. Everyone is doing it wrong. I'm thinking about a great way to solve things. You people should stop doing the bad thing. Come on, everyone. Let's do things right. Why is everything so bad? Why is life unfair? Why is our legacy so messy and complex? Let's start over. Let's set things straight. Justice, peace, correctness, truth, beauty. If we just think very hard, and come to a consensus, then we can implement something much, much better.

2\. The world is exactly the way it is. I'm not exactly sure why. Historians are working on it. The institutions that we exist within distribute power in a certain way. Matter is heavy and resistant to change. I don't really know how to "improve" the world, and if I tried, I may just make it worse. Why are you talking about abstract nonsense like "justice" and "truth"? This is just how it is. This is what we have to work with. We are lucky if we can make a few incremental improvements.

As in so many cases with two extremes that end up fighting unproductively, the vast middle ground is where the interesting stuff happens.

David Chapman... incidentally a contributor to the UNIX-HATERS handbook, decades ago... has a terminology with which I think my persona #1 would be called an eternalist and persona #2 a nihilist, roughly speaking.

And he wants to sketch out a persona #3, who operates under what he calls the fluid mode. That's someone who understands the viewpoints of both eternalism and nihilism, recognizes them both as incomplete, and then valiantly works to create things and change the world in a kind of liberated way.

So, we're not going to resolve the question in favor of either #1 or #2. Those personas are like the two daemons on the shoulders of anyone who does programming... or politics... or law... or urban planning... or economics...

The world would be very different if Lisp and Smalltalk hadn't existed, so it's not like cutting edge cool stuff is worthless just because it doesn't get adopted. I always like to see people encouraged to learn about these systems even if their "ecosystems" aren't "mature" for "web scale" or whatever. It's almost a matter of respect.

<comment><USER3> It might not be that we need to do one, the other, or a middle path. Instead, we can just focus through one of the mindsets on aspects of the problem. Remember that the projects are usually a collection of things. Each has to be solved independently with an integration. Then there's extensions. So, we can Right Thing key pieces of it even if not all of it. Further, as Gabriel noted, we can start with Worse is Better to get it moving then bring aspects into Right Thing status.

So, it's not all or nothing. My specialty, high assurance security, is Right Thing taken to the extreme for reliability or security. By the 1980's, they started kernelizing designs due to market forces making it impossible to apply to whole system. By the 1990's, they started doing it incrementally to increase uptake and financially justify the assurance work. Today, we've wisened up to try to concentrate our work on things that amplify overall correctness, reliability, or security. Type systems, compilers, kernels, protocols like Paxos (or Survivable Spread), model-based generation... anything where a little investment goes a long way.

Then we can smile knowing what people are using defiantly against our recommendations contains the results of seeds we planted earlier. Things got better even as they got worse. :) Just gotta figure out how to do that more often...

<comment><USER2> Ah, middle-pathing my middle-pathing—well played!

Interesting stuff. My story roughly speaking is that I came out of Chalmers all gung ho about dependent types and probably correct functional programming, and now I work on a JavaScript startup with not even many unit tests (which is partly my fault).

[I meant to say provably, but the autocorrect typo is illuminating.]

Generally I'm interested in logic in computer engineering, and I think the idea of safe kernels is great.

The Xmonad architecture seems to me like it might be a good model for coming architectures... Symbolically, it's nice and you can tell from just the name: X symbolizes UNIX and worse is better; monad stands for purity and correctness.

<comment><USER3> "My story roughly speaking is that I came out of Chalmers all gung ho about dependent types and probably correct functional programming, and now I work on a JavaScript startup with not even many unit tests (which is partly my fault)."

I tell people to focus on just what delivers the most value. I came up with a list of the few things that are empirically proven to benefit software quality:

[http://pastebin.com/xZ6m4T8Z](http://pastebin.com/xZ6m4T8Z)

So, for Javascript, you might do code reviews, use any static analyzers you know, decompose into functional style, have some interface checks encoding assumptions, and so on. Simple techniques that take little time, save you much time, and boost quality greatly. Plus, recall that you can do FP in many languages by subset and style. ;)

Note: This doesn't even count my old strategy of making a safe, macro-enabled 4GL that compiles to a target 3GL. You can code up shit in ML or Dependent language with constructs that can map 1-to-1 to JavaScript. Then, your tool produces Javascript from whatever you really code in. You deliver that w/out mentioning other tool. Best of both worlds.

I caught that: "I meant to say provably"

Not that: "but the autocorrect typo is illuminating" Lol nice catch. The autocorrect might have corrected an entire field's thinking rather than one person's spelling. You should contact the authors about the discovery of AI in their software. ;)

"Xmonad architecture"

I wasn't aware of it and I don't do functional programming yet. I'll have to add it to my list of things to check out.

Regarding provably-correct FP, what was your background, tools or projects? I might learn something or have something your interested in as I collect work in high assurance field. Have quite a few on that topic including some explorations but lack specialist expertise to really evaluate it.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, focusing on the highest value is great advice. Nice list!

Regarding FP, I think it's cool that there's so much activity and open source stuff going on, and from the community perspective it's a fresh angle for talking about correctness and reasoning and stuff.

Xmonad was a great community project for "teaching the virtues." Being a hacker's window manager, it was all about extensibility and configuration, kind of like this coral reef of experimentation. John Hughes used it as a big example when he gave talks on "real world" FP. The architecture is basically a pure core of compositional/algebraic/combinatoric stuff, with around 100% test coverage including lots of QuickCheck properties... surrounded by an interpreter layer that realizes this stuff into X11 commands.

So I'm really interested (not scholarly or academically or even professionally, just hobbyishly) in being able to express domains with actual logic. And since my interest's trajectory starts at Haskell and goes through Agda, I'm fascinated by the ability to unify proofs and programs (due to the Curry-Howard equivalence of typed lambda programs and constructive logic proofs).

I'm kind of waiting for more of that stuff to start growing in the open source / startup / GitHub / HN ecosystem. It ought to be very fruitful. With these new dependent type languages, proving becomes like hacking—you don't need to start as an academic logician, and you can bypass philosophical arguments about the definition of truth, because you just want to engineer a type- checking proof. So I think people could have fun with it. But there's a lot of alien notation and scary stuff...

Let me nerd out for a while since you seem interested, and I wanna spread the word about some things.

QuickCheck of course is a tool originally for Haskell that lets you very easily verify equational properties using type-directed random value generation. It's used in tons of real Haskell projects and it's super awesome. Recently I was writing a thing to synchronize Reddit comment state with a Git repository, and I used QuickCheck to verify that some JSON conversion things were isomorphic—this is a typical case where QuickCheck can instantly find tricky bugs and you barely have to write anything:

        quickCheck (\x -> parse (render x) == x)

gives you a powerful test suite, even if the types have lots of nesting.

Then, a later project that's not as well known is QuickSpec.

[http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~nicsma/papers/quickspec.pdf](http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~nicsma/papers/quickspec.pdf)

[https://github.com/nick8325/quickspec](https://github.com/nick8325/quickspec) (pretty good README)

It's kind of the inverse of QuickCheck: you would tell it to search for true equations involving parse and render, and it would _discover_ the isomorphic property. It does limited exhaustive search on application trees, and randomized testing for verifying equations. So it can be a great starting point for reasoning about your modules, if they're written in a way that makes them amenable to algebraic reasoning.

And then the next step is HipSpec.

[http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~jomoa/papers/hipspec- atx.pdf](http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~jomoa/papers/hipspec-atx.pdf)

[https://github.com/danr/hipspec](https://github.com/danr/hipspec)

It takes equations about Haskell functions, and then uses off-the-shelf automated theorem provers, combined with automatic lemmas from QuickSpec, to generate formal proofs automatically.

All this is made to work on actual Haskell code, and I think it points out a really cool path for getting hackers to bother with proofs and equations.

What I haven't seen so much yet, and this is one of my biggest curiosities / vague ambitions, is how to take different diverse domain models and extract an algebraic core.

Xmonad did it for window managing, which is super nice. I'd love to see more of that in different domains.

As I see it, that's what's going to make more people see a tangible value in otherwise abstract seeming stuff like equational reasoning.

This is already long enough, but a quick pointer to another eccentric interest I have, due to my brother who's great at finding value in seemingly obscure realms, and sticking with it even though people say he's crazy...

Interactive fiction is all about modelling objects and situations in a way that's comprehensible to humans, especially if you look at e.g. Inform 7, which uses English grammar as the basis for its declaration language, and has a very nice declarative modelling paradigm, quite novel stuff.

So that in itself is awesome, and I'd love to see some non-fiction programs written in Inform 7. It compiles to a virtual machine that as far as I know is decently fast and has I/O capabilities.

Then there's work by Chris Martens, which has been linked on HN at some point, on using linear logic as the basis for interactive fiction and general game prototyping.

> _My thesis project is a programming language for the design of interactive > narratives and game mechanics. The language is based on forward-chaining > linear logic programming, a way of declaratively describing state change. > This methodology makes it feasible to encode generative rules that create > procedural content for interactive simulations that give rise to emergent > narratives._

> _The language semantics ' basis in proof theory enables a structural > understanding of these narratives, making it possible to analyze them for > concurrent behavior among multiple agents. On a larger timescale, I imagine > growing the technology underlying this language into a high-level sketching > tool for game designers, usable for rapid prototyping and iteration._

[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmartens/](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmartens/)

So my crystal ball shows some really fascinating and awesome stuff coming out of that whole tradition in the somewhat near future...

Um... let's see if I'm even allowed to post this long comment...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is a really good discussion of Richard Gabriels essay, 'The Rise of Worse is Better', which should be, imo, required reading for all technologist (along with 'Mythical Man Month' and 'Soul of a New Machine'). The authors testimony resonated with me, once I realized that I'd never get adequate requirements, or time to fully implement a feature, and just solve the problem in front of me, is when I became happier in my career. Consequently more successful too.

</comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of a quotation from an interview with a George W. Bush administration official (widely understood to be Karl Rove, though I'm not sure that's ever been substantiated) that made the rounds raising hackles and inspiring slogans [1] in the left-leaning blogosphere ca. 10 years ago. The emphasis here is more on study versus action here, but I think there's clearly some parallel:

> The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based > community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge > from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured > something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. > "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an > empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're > studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, > creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things > will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be > left to just study what we do." [2]

[1] For a time, it was semi-common for left-leaning blogs to advertise themselves as part of "the reality-based community".

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith- certainty-a...](http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty- and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html)

<comment><USER6> Taken charitably, it sounds like the official is describing the state-level equivalent of _operating inside an enemy 's OODA loop_ (cf [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop), brought to my attention and reasonably well-explained by [http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/16/military-strategist- expl...](http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/16/military-strategist-explains-why- donald-trump-leads-and-how-he-will-fail/)) - roughly, acting so quickly as to make the enemy's response obsolete by the time they go through with it.

Worse-but-Better solutions make it to market dominance before the Right Thing has a chance to get off the ground; and then the Right Thing is no longer the right thing, because the reality has changed.

Taken uncharitably, of course, it sounds like puffed-up nonsense, which perhaps it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess i'm a 'right thing' developer.

I'm sure there are multiple constraints besides economic viability that could drive you to seek the 'right thing.'

I've noticed there are two types of developers: those that find fighting fires rewarding and enjoy the accolades that come with 'saving the day' and those that find fighting fires punishing, and that perceive requests to fix code in a hurry to be an intrusion.

I'm going to call them 'extrovert' and 'introvert' programmers.

I am an introvert programmer, and for me the 'right thing' has always meant code that I can put in production and forget about.

I also believe that introverts are in the minority, which means that when on a team introverts have to fight fires along with all the extroverts, even though their own code runs mostly without incident.

</comment><comment><USER8> The argument that the Worse is Better solution is flawed imho is incorrect. It's far more perfect than The Right Way, its just a solution to a more perfect problem. Instead of increasing the complexity of the program decrease the complexities of the problem itself and you end up with a much more reasonable result.

</comment><comment><USER9> Those interested, who have read RPG's original article, might want to learn more about his example of "the right thing", PC-lusering, by reading PCLSRing: Keeping Process State Modular by Alan Bawden ([http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/pclsr.htm](http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/pclsr.htm)), and then perhaps learn more about ITS, which can still be run on a PDP-10 simulator: [http://its.victor.se/wiki/](http://its.victor.se/wiki/) Those who don't want to go too far down that particular rabbit hole could do worse than read the first third of Steven Levy's Hackers, which is about the MIT AI Lab.

The reason ITS is rarely used now is more mundane than you might infer from RPG's articles: it was machine specific, being mostly written in MIDAS assembly language, and needs a PDP-10 to run it on, and DEC stopped making them. Unix is written mostly in C and is portable.

</comment><comment><USER10> To pick on one paragraph, it's not that the left thinks "The Market" is evil. It's neither good nor evil (amoral, not immoral), so it's irrational to count on it to be a force for good in the world.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Amorality in an economic system is a good thing. It means that participants impute their values within the institutional framework. An economic system actually designed to be "moral" (I can't think of anything other than Marxism- Leninism, everything else is hypothetical cost-the-limit-of-price, anti-usury, Social Credit and mutual aid arrangements) would be not only inflexible, but such a morality would necessarily emanate from a top-down institution that is immoral itself.

<comment><USER11> I'm not clear how that would be different to the top-down economy and moral pretensions of bankers and investors that we have now.

When phrases like "moral hazard" are used to describe gambling risk, "amoral" is hardly the most apt description of a system that actually tries to define social and political morality for the entire world of work and business.

The reality is that mainstream economics has always been more a branch of moral philosophy than of empirical science. It's a tool of persuasion that tries to propagate its values through rhetoric and the use of economic, political and physical force.

That's quite close to the usual definition of a priesthood. It's only "amoral" in the sense that the ethics of the priesthood are quite alien to those of many adult humans.

<comment><USER10> This is what I'm saying, only if you think unfettered free marketeering is an unalloyed good would you propose that the antithetical position is that the market is evil.

If I say I want restrictions on the market so that our planet is still liveable in 2100, I am not saying the market is evil. I'm merely stating my moral (in that there is a value judgment) position in contrast to the "free" market moral position. If I say that unfettered markets lead to evil, I'm merely contending with that value judgment, not whether there should a market in general. There's an incredible amount of space between a rampant libertarian market and Communism. It's childish to pretend otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm going to repeat the comment I made on the website here.

I think the history of technology is this. Grand visions that are publicly funded (Computers, The Internet, etc) have been since privatized and destroyed by the market.

I don't think you should compare Smalltalk vs Linux, but Alan Kay's Desktop GUI and Dynabook to today's UIs and the iPad.

It isn't a history of competing ideas that the market choose is correct. It is the history of grand ideas incubated in the public sector and then further distilled and misunderstood by the private sector.

The reality is the Market has little in making the decision between the grand idea and the distilled one. Consumers never had the opportunity to decide. Consumers were always given worse ideas to choose from to begin with.

Just like when you walk into a super market. You are given options that were decided for you. That were filtered through thousands of decisions made outside the market beforehand.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think there can exist a perhaps rarer beast that values BOTH perfection and viability.

What this one does is keep his/her obsessive-compulsive eye on what is the perfect goal, knowing full well it may never be reached, then she turns to making the _process_ itself perfect -- where a perfect process is defined as this: perfectly viable _while_ maintaining a minimal distance to the perfect goal.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Worse is better" is an incomplete sentence.

Different folks complete it in different ways. Some say that worse is better than complex. Others claim it's better than slow. Others still that it's better than incompatible. The point of the posted link is that worse is better than nothing. One can hardly argue with that.

<comment><USER6> > The point of the posted link is that worse is better than nothing.

No, that's inaccurate.

For instance, one example the article used to support WiB was that x86 (a CISC architecture) beat out RISC architectures. There were many RISC architectures: MIPS, SPARC, DEC Alpha, PA-RISC. So it's not a case of worse is better than _nothing_. x86 won against real competition, because it took advantage of evolutionary pressures.

<comment><USER14> The article contains several examples for the different interpretations. CISC vs. RISC is an example of "worse is better than incompatible". Unix vs. lisp- machine is an example of "worse is better than complex". But the bottom line, for this specific author, is that worse is better than nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice essay. But framing the problem in terms of evolutionary vs. counter- evolutionary is not useful. Of course the evolutionary is going to win. It wins by definition. Evolution is the survival of the fittest. Being evolutionary means betting on the winner.

</comment><comment><USER3> He beat me to it as I'm mentally working on a similar essay. Backward compatibility and shipping pressure I already covered a lot in my posts on Schneier's blog elaborating on this. See Steve Lipner's Ethics of Perfection essay for a great take on "ship first, fix later" mentality. He had previously done a high-assurance, secure VMM. So, he had been on both sides.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150319122817/http://blogs.micr...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150319122817/http://blogs.microsoft.com/cybertrust/2007/08/23/the- ethics-of-perfection/)

On backward compatibility, you need to explore lock-in and network effects. These are the strongest drivers of the revenues of the biggest tech firms. Once you get the market with shipping, people will start building on top of and around your solution. They get stuck with it after they do that enough to make it hard to move. Familiarity with language or platform matters here, too. The economics become more monopolistic where you determine just enough additions to keep them from moving.

I agree with a commenter there that it needs a OpenVMS tie-in: a great example of Right Thing vs Worse is Better that _won_ in market. While their management was good. ;) It had better security architecture, individual servers went years without reboot, mainframe-like features (eg batch & transactions), cross-language development of apps, clustering in 1980's, more English-like command language, management tech, something like email... the whole kitchen sink all integrated & consistent. Reason was it was a company of engineers making what they themselves would like to use then selling it to others to sustain it. Also mandated quality where they'd develop for a week, run tests over weekend, fix problems for a week, and repeat. That's why sysadmins forgot how to reboot them sometimes. ;)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS)

Here's a few others that fall under Cathedral and Right Thing model that got great results with vastly fewer people than Worse is Better and/or were successful in the market. Burroughs and System/38 still exist as Unisys MCP and IBM i respectively. Lilith/Oberon tradition of safe, easy-to-analyze, and still fast lives on in Go language designed to recreate it. There's nothing like Genera anymore but Franz Allegro CL still has a consistent, do-about- anything experience. QNX deserves mention since it's a Cathedral counter to UNIX where they implemented POSIX OS with real-time predictability, fault- isolation via microkernel, self-healing capabilities, and still very fast. Still sold commercially and was how Blackberry Playbook smashed iPad in comparisons I saw. They once put a whole desktop (w/ GUI & browser) on a floppy with it. Throw in BeOS demo showing what its great concurrency architecture could do for desktops. Remember this was mid-1990's, mentally compare to your Win95 (or Linux lol) experience, and let your jaw drop. Mac OS X, due to Nextstep, could probably be called a Cathedral or Right Thing that made it in market, too.

[http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr...](http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burroughs%20B-5000.htm)

[https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/Chapter8.pdf](https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/Chapter8.pdf)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_%28computer%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_%28computer%29)

[http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm](http://www.symbolics- dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm)

[http://www.qnx.com/products/neutrino-rtos/neutrino- rtos.html...](http://www.qnx.com/products/neutrino-rtos/neutrino- rtos.html#technology)

[https://youtu.be/cjriSNgFHsM?t=16m5s](https://youtu.be/cjriSNgFHsM?t=16m5s)

So, more food for thought. The thing the long-term winners had in common is that (a) they grabbed a market, (b) they held it long enough for legacy code/user-base to build, (c) incrementally added what people wanted, and (d) stick around due to legacy effect from there. Seems to be the only proven model. It can be The Right Thing or Worse is Better so long as it has those components. So, we Right Thing lovers can continue to trying to make the world look more Right. :)

</comment><comment><USER16> This article is nothing more than ideological bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER17> A new example of worse is better vs the right thing: the containers movement (esp Kubernetes) vs OpenStack.

Before that, (the early) AWS vs Grid computing/OGF.</comment>


TuProlog: Making Prolog Ubiquitous - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2013/10/tuprolog-making-prolog-ubiquitous/

<comment><USER2> I have a question that I have often wanted to ask of someone that knows something about declarative programming. In my day job, I spend most of my time worrying about trying to make my code run faster (I do low-level user- interface work - building the libraries that application UIs then use, so it's all about moving pixels as fast as possible, getting data to the app as fast as possible etc. If I need to make a SW blit run faster, I go into the function doing the blit, and I may replace some of the C code with some SSE- style vectorised assembler. Or I may choose to run an expensive SQL query once a day, storing the result in a binary file that is then used to feed application data requests, or other things of that nature.

I just don't see how those kinds of optimisations could be done in a declarative language. Do I just have an unusual use-case, or are these languages seriously constrained with respect to the types of programs that they can be used for?

<comment><USER3> > I just don't see how those kinds of optimisations could be done in a > declarative language.

Not to be an ass, but why not? All of your examples are, in principle, doable in a declarative language.

<comment><USER4> > Not to be an ass, but why not?

He's not saying it can't be done, he wants to ask "someone that knows something about declarative programming".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We used tuProlog for rule-based intelligent agents in several applications and it worked pretty well, but its poor performance eventually led us to look for alternative implementations. That was about five years ago, though, and perhaps it has improved.

<comment><USER6> Nice to see SOMEONE mentioned its use in rule-based AI. I find it rather confusing how everyone only mentions its use in NLP and harldy ever AI. Anyone care to comment on it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For anyone interested in Prolog the usual book recommendations are:

"Programming Prolog" (Mellish & Clocksin), "The Art of Prolog" (as a first/second book), "The Craft of Prolog" (as an advanced book for later)

I don't own the first one but "Art of Prolog" was a little over my head when I got it (maybe I'm not that smart) and the typical "family database" examples are kind of tedious. I've worked through a couple of books now and the first book I'd recommend these days is "Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence". Don't let the AI in the title distract you, Part 1 is a very good introduction to Prolog (the best I'm aware of) and Part 2 covers typical AI topics (also very interesting of course).

</comment><comment><USER8> I really like Mercury[1] so good to see anything Prolog up here. Prolog was the first language I learnt from a theoretical point of view (first learning the in depth language theory before writing a line of code) at university and I have always liked it since.

I try to create things with Mercury but it's so fresh that it's rather hard; almost no-one is using it so when something goes wrong (which it will do when trying to do real-life stuff and linking libraries to do) there are not many people to ask and the people who are working with it are rather busy.

Anyway; Prolog is a nice language for some use cases; try it.

[1] [http://mercurylang.org/](http://mercurylang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER9> A couple of other interesting applications of Prolog I haven't seen mentioned yet:

Cascalog, Prolog-inspired data processing and querying library for Clojure: [https://github.com/nathanmarz/cascalog](https://github.com/nathanmarz/cascalog)

Marelle, test-driven devops in SWI-Prolog: [https://github.com/larsyencken/marelle](https://github.com/larsyencken/marelle)

</comment><comment><USER10> Prolog was on my list of "neat to learn languages" but I never got around to it.

Any Prolog fans here to sing its praises?

<comment><USER11> The Prolog class I took in college wound up being one of my favorite classes (although I was alone on that amongst all of my friends).

I always liked the idea of declarative programming, it felt very natural when I first learned about it. That being said, I didn't have much use for Prolog after finishing that class. (I wrote one fairly small application at my first job, but really nothing else).

I think that if you're interested by any of the recent developments around the Kanrens (or Core.Logic if you're a Clojure programmer), you'll find yourself better served by at least having a passing familiarity with Prolog.

I also find that SQL feels to me quite a bit like Prolog (you have to sort of squint), and I find myself liking writing SQL way more than you're apparently supposed to from how much people complain about it online. That might have nothing to do with having learned Prolog, maybe my brain is just wired wrong.

<comment><USER12> > I also find that SQL feels to me quite a bit like Prolog (you have to sort > of squint), and I find myself liking writing SQL way more than you're > apparently supposed to from how much people complain about it online. That > might have nothing to do with having learned Prolog, maybe my brain is just > wired wrong.

It's not just you. I'm in the process of writing "Euclid's Elements in SQL". It can be a beautiful thing if you think in relations, rather than tables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> i see no mention of a C ABI interface - this is the one truly cross platform interface we have which has no prior dependency, and it is at the native level.

it utterly boggles my mind how this is not the first thing mentioned or used. maybe it is just in there anyway and i need to find out. will definitely take a look at this as a fan of prolog anyway. :)

SWI-Prolog provides C interface for instance...

<comment><USER5> tuProlog does not offer an interface directly to C code. It's implemented in Java and does provide a decent interface to Java code. I suppose you could develop a JNI interface to your C library code, and then interface tuProlog with that, but that's admittedly a complicated approach.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why would weapons research be a bad thing? - <AUTHOR> In the thread about YC's investment of Helion, there was an interesting sub-topic: the fear that the founding team might pivot into weapons research.  People have expressed concern that it might be risky for an investment firm to be investing in weapons research because it might harm their halo effect.
I don't understand why weapons research would even slightly diminish an investment firm's halo effect.  More than that, I don't understand how weapons research could ever be anything but a positive thing.  Societies with fierce weapons are empirically safer than those with outdated weapons.
I thought this would be an interesting topic for discussion, and since it's offtopic for the original thread, I figured I'd make an Ask HN about it.  I'm quite open to being persuaded. <comment><USER2> >Societies with fierce weapons are empirically safer than those with outdated weapons.

I think weapons are only relevant to safety when they're used, or when the threat of their use is plausible. More modern weapons with their greater killing power make the society using them safer, but only when they're being used against other societies, with a certain distance. Used domestically, and with the possibility of retaliation, not so much.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Societies with fierce weapons are empirically safer than those with outdated weapons."

Here is a gedanken experiment:

Assume that YC decides to invest in SunniTech, a startup that does research into sustainable, ecologically friendly, easy to make, pastel coloured, child friendly and highly lethal briefcase H-bombs for use by Hamas.

Describe in 10 words or less, the impact of this hypothetical decision on :

1\. your view of YC

2\. the political fall out

3\. the regulatory and legal ramifications.

</comment><comment><USER4> For me, it's a matter of ethics. I would be spending time/money on figuring out better ways to destroy things or kill people. I'm not sure I could sleep well knowing that.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Societies with fierce weapons are empirically safer than those with outdated weapons" \- correlation does not imply causation.

<comment><USER6> c.f. the old Heinlein canard about how 'an armed society is a polite society'.</comment></comment>


Voicegem (YC S12) joins Palantir - <AUTHOR> http://blog.voicegem.com/post/43241478510/voicegem-joins-palantir <comment><USER2> "One of those tools was a voice based email service that quickly grew beyond our friends at the local senior houses"

If the service is doing well, why is it being shut down?

<comment><USER3>
        30 seconds/recording: presumed average recording length

        1,000,000 seconds: a bit higher than the total number of seconds of audio recorded

        8 months: Amount of time service was around

        1,000,000 seconds / 30 seconds/recording = 33,333 recordings

        33,333 recordings / 8 months = 4,166 recordings/month = 138 recordings/day.

Assuming that the average user tried it out once and then didn't use it again, VoiceGem was getting about 140 new users a day. If the average user used it more than once, they were getting even fewer new users. Startups are hard.

Edit: for some reason, Josh Constine at TechCrunch decided to reference my arithmetic. I just want to make sure it's clear that I'm happy for Arda and Alexander for finding an exit, and that startups are hard. I'm not trying to be snarky.

<comment><USER4> all you are going to deduce from this is whatever you put into your model. if they were getting exponential growth then most of the calls would have been recent. and they imply that they had viral growth because use was spreading...

on the other hand, presumably they didn't decide to fuck over a bunch of grannies for fun (even if they did go to palantir). so it was an acquihire. so maybe some part of the description was more positive than the unvarnished truth?

<comment><USER5> It never really says it is an acqui-anything. Maybe they are just winding down and getting jobs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congrats!

You may want to place a hyperlink to Palantir in your blogpost. I'm assuming it's these guys (?): <http://www.palantir.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations! Palantir has a lot of interesting technical challenges and great engineers, ops people, etc. -- I think you'll love it there.

</comment><comment><USER8> Known Arda and Alex for years. They are really smart guys and Palantir is lucky to have them! Sad to see you two go though, but enjoy NYC!

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, congrats fellow "no idea" batchmates!

</comment><comment><USER10> Looking forward to meet you guys in nyc!

</comment><comment><USER11> Congratulations to you both, enjoy NYC!

</comment><comment><USER12> love this team, congrats!</comment>


Ask HN: Any companies that learn what I'm interested in by clicks on RSS links? - <AUTHOR>

I'm noticing lately that reading through my RSS feeds takes me a substantial amount of time everyday.  I get upwards of 200 articles every day in my RSS reader, and I click on maybe 30 or 40 articles that I find interesting.  Is there any RSS reader software / company that can learn what I like from what I click through on, and start customizing my feed by culling out links not in what my current interests are?<p>Additionally, if this system existed, it could also find people that share your general interests by what you are mutually reading. <comment><USER2> Google Reader has a recommended links feature that may be of interest to you.</comment>


Ask HN: Help a Hacker Out - <AUTHOR> As the result of a series of unfortunate misfires and suboptimal decisions I've found myself in the unenviable position of being unemployed and living back home with my mom in Des Moines, Iowa. While it may sound like a setup for a romantic comedy, the fact that a plucky and attractive female has yet to make an apparence has made it painfully clear that it's not going to be that kind of a movie. So, before the cement dries on what was intended to be a very short-term situation and I find myself greeting shoppers at Walmart, I've decided to buy a one-way ticket to SF where there seems to be plenty of opportunity for the likes of me. The only problem is that I don't have a job, an interview, or even any connections I can leverage.
But if you need help solving hard problems, I'm your guy. I have an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and a masters in Mathematics from Iowa State. I know C++ and Python ok and I've worked as a derivatives quant, a high-frequency trader and even tried my hand at poker for a while. I'm open to short or long-term consulting projects as well as full-time employment. I'm particularly interested in working on challenging problems dealing with algorithms and big data, but I'm up for jumping back into HFT if there's a decent opportunity. Hell, I'll even tutor linear algebra or basket weaving if that's where this adventure needs to begin.
In short, I'm a smart guy coming to SF and I need an opportunity. Please help a hacker out. <comment><USER2> I own a company that currently indexes/sorts/sells different algo-based trending information to hedge funds. We also do big-data management for a few of them as well (think processing/storing 4 million messages/second). I'd be interested in some consulting and possibly a full-time position. We have excellent programmers/mathematicians now, but always like to bring on someone with some experience/new things to bring to the table. If you actually worked as a trader, we could get you on our prop floor with some stability track record. Respond here to gauge your interest, and I'll shoot you an email. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Current (and past) experience in this field, if you're looking for someone to do some contracting I'd be interested in hearing more about what you guys do. I'm local. yoblin -at- gmail _dot_ com

<comment><USER2> Great - will do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate to be "that guy" but how on earth with such experience and credentials you resort to HN to find a job? Does not compute.

<comment><USER5> Finding a job is almost just as difficult as hiring, even if the person is credentialed and the company has many open positions. If you don't know exactly what you are looking for or what you may be good at, theres a good chance you might spin your wheels.

This is pretty common in the tech industry as I've come to realize. The issue is that many people can be good at programming, and hell, they might even have open source projects or even shipped applications to show for it. But put them in a software engineering interview where they have to walk through a basic dynamic programming or data structures problem and they will probably stumble. This situation is even more likely for interdisciplinary individuals where they don't have typical degrees for their field of interest.

So, point being, it takes a while to find a good fit. One where your skills expectations are agreeable for both sides. I don't see advertising on HN an issue, since we are the target market for this type of situation, but so long as it doesn't become a job board.

<comment><USER6> _I don't see advertising on HN an issue, since we are the target market for this type of situation, but so long as it doesn't become a job board._

Someone started a "Who's looking" thread a month or two ago. It would be nice to see that become a regular fixture alongside the "Who's Hiring" thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just shot you an email, but this seems like a reasonable place to note that my employer (Twitter) is hiring like mad, and we definitely have some big data to work with:

<https://twitter.com/jobs/home>

<comment><USER8> Hmmm... I applied at Twitter and got the coding problem done right. I also contributed to one of Twitter's open source projects, "Snowflake." Either you got to have a great story like this Iowa guy, or hiring at Twitter is broken. :-( This might be my next HN post: "How I Interviewed Great at Twitter but a bad coder got my job."

<comment><USER9> Maybe the fact that you didn't get hired has something to do with you coming off as a total asshole. What exactly makes you think the OP is a "bad coder"?

Maybe you should write a post titled, "How Twitter Failed to Fulfill My Sense of Entitlement".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Come to Texas. We have cheap cost of living and baller-as-hell problems to work on, whether you want games or graphics or oil & gas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm thinking about that. I really like the idea of going to Austin but the reason I'm thinking of SF is because the software / data scene there is off the charts. A friend of mine told me yesterday it's like what Paris 1910 was for painters.

<comment><USER10> So, looking over at Houston there are all kinds of crazy datasets for both energy exploitation and energy trading. There's a thriving if quiet startup community, and a local private university of some note in applied math (Rice). It's pretty unpretentious, but that's the city--we are all about the bidness.

Besides, it's a chance to crunch numbers for something other than selling ads and cat pictures. :)

<comment><USER11> Would you happen to know how to find these companies? I know of a few (FlightAware, for instance) but figuring out who's doing what in Houston isn't as easy as the Bay Area. I've been trying to get in touch with some companies in Houston (I graduate in May) and I'd much appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> UChicago math undergrad? I have complete confidence you won't be acting this role for long...

You should reach out to people from your class (and years around it) that ended up in SF. Check out RethinkDB for example - part of their team is UChicago. Lollihop is another one.

</comment><comment><USER13> I saw a presentation by the Founder of Dwolla which suggested they were working on some interesting monetary software. Located right in Des Moines : [http://blog.dwolla.com/another-ramp-looking-for-more-team- me...](http://blog.dwolla.com/another-ramp-looking-for-more-team-members/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm in SF, I own a company that writes scripts to moderate internet access at mobile RV parks. We use some Python and sharepoint. I think you would be a great match to work well in the office with my other 2 guys. Keep an eye out for an email.

<comment><USER15> Python + Sharepoint to moderate internet access? Wow....why?

<comment><USER16> I'm actually super curious. It seems like an incredibly odd stack for an incredibly odd application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Your quant skills (and humor) sound like a great match for <http://quantopian.com>. If you signup for the alpha using the kozjob email you shared below, and we'll let you through. If you like what you see, drop us a line, maybe there's more we can do together.

</comment><comment><USER18> Good luck! I hope you'll make a follow-up post to tell us how it all went at some later point.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great point, I'll do that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I forgot my email address (I'm the OP)

kozjob at yahoo.com

<comment><USER19> You should throw it in your profile. Most people will look there first (rather than through the comment thread).

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. I updated it.

<comment><USER20> You'll actually need to put it in the "about" field, since the email field isn't public.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm curious about your experience in the HFT field. Have you ever considered starting your own trading shop?

If this isn't something you feel comfortable discussing in public, feel free to email me — address in my profile. I don't have a job to offer you right now, but would like to talk. When you get to SF, lunch or beer on me.

<comment><USER2> Hey gcv,

What do you mean, exactly, by starting a trading shop? If you mean becoming a broker dealer, that will require certificates and capital - and lots of it! :P

<comment><USER21> I was thinking more along the lines of proprietary trading. There is no regulatory oversight for risking your own money, and the amounts required to get started are reasonably modest. See, e.g., [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9s9d7/iama_100_automat...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9s9d7/iama_100_automated_independent_retail_trader_i/)

<comment><USER2> Ahh - agreed. Getting around PDT for $2,500 and having incredibly cheap leverage makes for an interesting market (though one bad trade and your done - you have to put it all on the line with such a small account)! Though if you do not have that much capital, jumping into futures/options trading against the best in the world - you will get your head chopped off. The far shot of a reality such as the one on reddit is not a good one to try to reproduce. I definitely recommend he read "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. While it's obviously a biased book (even just taking into account the title) - it does shed some light on the subject.

<comment><USER22> Regarding "Fooled by Randomness". I haven't read the book, but assume it's brought up in the inherent randomness of the markets, and people's ability to try to rationalize said randomness.

Trying to understand the market is surely a shortcut to crazy town, and certainly trying to rationalize it is a poor mechanism to profit. But it's clearly evident that the market isn't uniformly random, and that there exists exploitable patterns in the market that are reliably (to a degree) profitable over certain time periods.

I think the thesis of "Fooled by Randomness" is best taken advantage of by understanding that you need to recognize the pattern, and exploit it directly, rather than trying to extrapolate meaning and use that directly.

The market is clearly a truly chaotic system, but you just need to take advantage of patterns that are statistically relevant and profitable.

Edit: After additional contemplation, I'm not sure I actually agree with what I just said.

<comment><USER2> haha - interesting edit that you have!

I currently have been making money the last 3 years by trading futures. It's been consistent, however, my co-founder of our fund has been trading for 20 years, lost his family, lost all his money, his house, everything. He was working at dominos when I took a little risk to give him some cash to trade, and boy was it a good decision. You could even say then, that the fooled by randomness theory exists - I was _really_ lucky to have found him and he was _really_ lucky to have been able to succeed. Regardless, it is possible. For every successful trader I personally know, I can give you 10 that majorly failed. It's human nature to want to try it - to be in (arguably) the most competitive business in the world. I offer my advice on where to start for free, but jumping into HFT in the really big markets is where people get crushed. Our current trading system can read a quote, send an order, and get confirmation about 2,000 times before you can blink! With that said, there are a lot of places (penny stocks, spread strategies, smaller equities) where you can thrive, and not have to trade against big machines. I will post to hackernews one day with an overview of his story and what we do

<comment><USER22> It seems that doing HFT without being in a datacenter close to the exchanges is a loosing strategy, since at these frequencies, a delay of milliseconds can make a huge difference. Do you agree with this assessment?

<comment><USER2> 100% absolutely - here is a really good TED talk that puts things in perspective (sorry if it's a repost, but it's definitely worth your time to watch) : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDaFwnOiKVE>

For just momo or momentum traders that deal in extremely liquid trading instruments, microseconds can even make a difference. Our current feed from a US equity exchange is about 220 microseconds or .22 miliseconds - and we are on the "slow" side of things. The guys that actually read, process, send transactions usually go as far as using FPGAs even (some of the bigger firms)

That said - there are still lots of places in the market where opportunities exist!

<comment><USER22> Thanks, I'll watch the talk with I get a spare moment.

Regarding the existing opportunities, It's interesting imagining a situation where opportunities did not exist, seemingly the market would either become completely random, and driven by luck, or remarkably stable. Most interestingly it crazy to imagine a market that has been optimized to complete stability. I wonder if that's the natural progression of things.

<comment><USER2> I think in a big rhythmic cycle, that may be true. I have friends that are fund managers that say, now, the market is completely and totally efficient, and that people making money are just "lucky" - both are interesting and somewhat valid! If 10,000 funds trade, there will be some profitable one (even though there were SO few in 2008). It's an interesting study, even if you aren't a trader

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I hope you get the girl.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm a student at Iowa State and know of plenty of opportunities in the Des Moines area. Have you looked around Des Moines? Seems like the insurance companies (or maybe even a big startup like Dwolla) would have a use for someone with a Math masters.

<comment><USER25> I agree with this. I think you can get a job in insurance companies on your hometown. Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My team is looking for mathematicians to help solve huge problems in the world of YouTube/online video. I just sent you a message.

<comment><USER27> what are you working on? I'm not looking for work, just have a fascination with the space. are you guys stealth mode?

<comment><USER26> I love seeing interest in our space. The audience on YouTube is massive. The current mode of measuring this audience is just the tip of the iceberg. We believe there is much to be learned in dissecting this audience and how they connect with online video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Good luck dude!.Being a fellow job seeker myself I can understand how hard it is to find any decent job without connections or an ivy league degree even when you have decent skills.

Also I see you have some writing skills too.You can be a great asset for companies who are trying to get some good content on their blogs and gain traction.

</comment><comment><USER29> How about Google? Happy to start the process for you if you send me an email (my-hn-username AT google.com).

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, email your way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Make sure you check out Addepar - they're developing a wealth management platform that seems like a good thing for you to work on given your experience. Only negative is that you'd have to learn Java, but it's a small price to pay to get involved with an up-and-comer.

</comment><comment><USER31> Come to Startup Weekend Des Moines before you go! This weekend, March 2-4: <http://dsm.startupweekend.org/>

Also, you should try Dwolla, who are awesome, committed to building the Des Moines hacker ecosystem.

EDIT: Emailed to offer help.

</comment><comment><USER32> Post a link to this story on G+ to give you more exposure. Plenty of folks from the valley hang out there as well. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love the positive response this is getting! Sometimes I fall back into thinking HN is just another list of news, but a real sense of community pops up at a moment like this. Good luck finding work lesterfremn!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, suprised me quite a bit really. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't have close to what you have as a background but I've been able to get interest in my resume and just landed a position in sf, I havev the fortune of having family out there so maybe that helped, but you should be able to get a lot of interest I would think... Have you been applying like crazy and networking on linkedin, etc, posting resumes?

Id be happy to help in any way I can, my email is rick_developer at gmx dot com

</comment><comment><USER35> "I'm particularly interested in working on challenging problems dealing with algorithms and big data"

Give one of our competitions a shot - <http://kaggle.com/>. They're a good way to experiment with algorithms and machine learning on well-defined problems, and collaborate with people who have similar interests. Also, we love hiring people who win competitions.

</comment><comment><USER36> Let me start by saying welcome to San Francisco!

We've got lots of opportunities for smart guys like you and we love C++ here at Room77.

We may not have the "big data" opportunities like Twitter has but we have a big dream, to build the best hotel shopping site in the world and we've got amazing VCs and people backing us and we have a lot of interesting problems to solve.

Your quant and derivatives background is especially interesting since we have a new project that's basically custom made for someone who wants to build a highly algo-driven engine.

Send me an email roger[at]room77.com if you're interested in finding out more or just shoot us your resume here and complete a few of our problems [https://www.room77.com/jobs/se_resume_form.html?p=SWE&s=...](https://www.room77.com/jobs/se_resume_form.html?p=SWE&s=web)

<comment><USER37> Hello from the fourth floor!

Actually I am in Long Beach now but usually I am upstairs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Put your github, stackoverflow, blog, research papers, web apps etc in your profile, and possibly work the confidence index up, and let folks know your'e avail for remote work now

 _I know C++ and Python ok_

(never took math classes at U of C, but spent lots of time in Eckhart library)

<comment><USER28> The more you know the more you understand how less you know :)

<comment><USER38> _unknown unknowns – things we do not know we don't know_

Yup Rumsfeld knew blind spots

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> We're seeking a smart guy/Python/big data engineer. Please send your resume (or other evidence of ability) to jobs(at)proximiant(dot)com. Proximiant is developing a touch-and-go digital receipt service.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wow, you sound really optimistic (and who shouldn't be? You'll slay SF!)

Good luck man :-)

</comment><comment><USER41> Contact me, email is in profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Email on the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Good luck man, fellow Iowan myself.

</comment><comment><USER43> Hope this goes through for you, goodluck!

</comment><comment><USER44> Dwolla!

</comment><comment><USER45> Hit me up when you're in SF; we can reminisce about Eckhart Hall.

<comment><AUTHOR> Crusty old building. Smart people.

<comment><AUTHOR> There was this intense Indian professor who had this air about him that was sort of condescending but more just dismissive. Ie, there was some pretty intense sttt he would routinely characterize as trivial or obvious.

The thing was, you were never sure whether he was trolling you or not. At a party or some event, supposedly somebody asked him what his research interest was. They were probably expecting to hear something like knot theory or PDE or whatever, but his research interest was "Mathematics", which I guess makes sense because that's what he worked on.

He liked teaching undergraduates but the department only let him do it once every four years or so, as the memories faded from the last time he did it. The year he taught the honors analysis class, it started in the fall with something like 32 students (and all of them by invitation at that) and ended with 6. And so the six survivors printed up T-shirts for having completed the course and wore them to the spring semester final. He's handing out the final and sees the shirts and says something like, "Don't be too confident about that."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Why not take the Steve Jobs route and walk into a company's office and refuse to leave until they offer you a job. Square is in downtown San Fran.</comment>


How to Insall Linux Mint 7 (Gloria) - <AUTHOR> http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-linux-mint-7-gloria

<comment><USER2> Why on earth do all of these so-called "perfect desktops" just rely on installing some n packages? By that measure _any_ reasonably-supported distro could become the "perfect desktop".

</comment><comment><USER3> What about wireless? I have a functioning wireless connection with my Vista desktop. However it seems really hard to get going with Ubuntu. I can't figure out exactly what to do with Ndiswrapper and if I need a new driver. Can't I just use what I have on Linux if I allow proprietary stuff?

Wireless still seems to be the most annoying thing about Linux.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is no open-source replacement for Excel or Photoshop.

Excel is the language/IDE in which many of the world's financial models are developed. Everyone I've heard from who's in a position to say something on the matter has indicated that it's virtually irreplaceable. It has many hidden features and tricks which cannot be replicated in OpenOffice Calc.

<comment><USER5> Gimp is absolutely a replacement for Photoshop. Not necessarily adequate for professionals, but a replacement nonetheless.

<comment><USER4> If it doesn't produce prepress output, it isn't a replacement for Photoshop.

Lolcats and photographs of models changed to look like comic book superheroines are accidental use cases for Photoshop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So this so called "perfect desktop" prescribes no less than ten media players and four cd/dvd rippers and burners? Would it be less than perfect if I only installed two or three media players?

<comment><USER7> ...And it is making the "true Windows replacement" approach - again (so many)... Gimp=Photoshop, OpenOffice=MSOffice, yadda-yadda-yadda... Need a great Linux desktop setup? Find distro with the best package manager and packages for your needs and install the software to suit what you are trying to get done... Need to edit a Word doc? Install Abiword or OpenOffice... Need to edit a JPG? Gimp. Related note: <http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22perfect+linux+desktop%22>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Too bad there is no 64-bit version. I've been on 64-bit for five years. Why is everyone else taking so long?

(8GB of RAM here on main workstation.)

</comment><comment><USER9> flagged for howtoforge linkbait

</comment><comment><USER10> So we've learned that Windows has the best desktop system? Title is misleading here.</comment>


First modern coreboot server platform - lame-robot-hoax https://9esec.io/blog/first-modern-coreboot-server-platform/ <comment> lame-robot-hoax As well, below is Mullvad's corresponding blog post:

[https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2019/8/7/open-source-firmware- fu...](https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2019/8/7/open-source-firmware-future/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not well versed on this; does the BMC code also get replaced, or is this the motherboard firmware only?

<comment><USER2> Motherboard only. On the other hand, ASPEED 2400 is supported by OpenBMC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, very interesting!

The 2016 OpenBMC presentation I'm watching now says that it's REST+D-Bus, and no IPMI, which actually seems like a good idea to me...

<comment><USER3> Unless you need to be compatible with some existing provisioning system.

<comment><AUTHOR> True; though it does look like there's an ipmitool that uses the REST/D-Bus interface:

[https://github.com/openbmc/ipmitool](https://github.com/openbmc/ipmitool)

so as long as your provisioning tool uses ipmitool, it could work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The elephant in the room: How many binary blobs are in use for the system firmware?

Still interesting work though

<comment><USER5> I mean you have to get coreboot functioning before getting to libreboot don't you?

<comment><USER4> libreboot is a fork of coreboot, so yes.

But if a system supported it through reverse engineering or otherwise I don't see why running coreboot without blobs would be possible (see very old hardware for example)</comment></comment></comment>


Saudis preparing to admit Jamal Khashoggi died during interrogation - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/15/middleeast/saudi-khashoggi-death-turkey/index.html <comment><USER2> Sounds like a polite way to say 'Murdered by prolonged torture' to me. I would be curious if they can present any evidence to the contrary.</comment>